editorial
” “On 6 April 1992, without any external attack, Yugoslavia ” “self-laceratingly embarked ” “on a war that has ” “been called "interethnic"” “but that perhaps had mainly ” “economic and political roots” “
It may seem banal to say that each country has its own characteristics, although everyone hastens to point out that each people is formed of persons and that each person is different. What characterizes the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Balkan peoples in general, is an unusually large dose of pessimism and fatalism at all times. Fatalism, because these people believe that history isn’t written by themselves, but over their heads; pessimism, because they consider this situation as ineluctable. In this perspective even the past becomes the historic present; it is not purged by forgetfulness, on the contrary is ever alive, active and immediate. And between the present and the past the search for links and parallelisms is continuous… So in this period during which the events that marked the beginning of the dismemberment of Yugoslavia are being commemorated, there are those who recall that the 6 April is a fateful day for these peoples: for it was on 6 April 1941 that the first Yugoslavia was attacked and destroyed, split and dismembered, occupied in part by the Germans, in part by the Italians. And on 6 April 1992, without any external attack, Yugoslavia self-laceratingly embarked on a war that has been called “interethnic” and interreligious, but that perhaps at that time mainly presented economic and political roots. It was a war that, in statistical terms, was one of the longest on record. It was a conflict that caused millions of refugees and displaced persons and destruction on a scale which will be difficult to repair. Yet this war still poses the problem of whether it can be identified at all as a “war” (i.e. with a conflict between States, begun, conducted and ended according to the norms of international law), or a “conflict” identifiable with so-called civil war or with a short- or long-term clash between institutions essentially non-state in character. The accords signed by the Republic of Bosnia, the Republic of Croatia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia at Paris on 24 November and at Dayton on 14 December 1995 put an end to the conflict which had caused untold suffering to the population and reduced the whole region to misery and destruction. In the attempt to reconstruct an interethnic and interreligious fabric, the accords included an annex containing the constitution of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a new State which arose from the rubble of the war. This constitution had been devised with the aim of giving rise to a kind of tripartite State with a rapid alternation of governments (normally every six months), each headed by an authority belonging to the one or the other ethnic group. But in response to this complex constitutional machinery, what happened “on the ground” showed the difficulties of a system that presupposes the existence of harmony and forms of cooperation that were non-existent but that the Dayton accords were intended to create. Today, ten years after the outbreak of the conflict and six years after its end, the situation in Bosnia appears somewhat bleak: the reconstruction is slow, the economy is still struggling to take off and everything is subordinated to the presence of the security forces and the international agencies that act in the area on the basis of the “Dayton system” and that also represent the source of income of many Bosnian people. To this is added the fact that, from the viewpoint of democracy, the State is in “progress”, i.e. developing, hopefully in a positive way, given the succession of electoral ballots at the national and local level at almost six-monthly intervals… But the Council of Europe and the European Union represent the mirage of this people who are by now disenchanted, but who still hope that something may happen outside Bosnia that will lift them out of the morass. The Dayton accords, signed by all the sides in the conflict, were aimed at encouraging them to assume their own responsibility: and the most important States as well as the European Union acted as witnesses to them. The aim was that Bosnia-Herzegovina should become the arbiter of its own destiny: it’s a pity, then, that this scenario is already being threatened by more than one error committed by the international community and by the memory of a past that continues to haunt the present and that perhaps it would be better to forget if people are to look to a different future with greater trust.
